Fever
by Bekkoni
Summary: Superman is stricken by a mysterious disease that may prove deadly even to him. Meanwhile, the Justice League must face one of their toughest threats: a villain who not only knows their deepest secrets but is targeting them one by one.
1. Symptomatic

~Chapter One~

"Toyman!" Superman thundered, breaking through the outer wall of the warehouse. "Give yourself up!"

"Really?" Toyman's idiotic, screechy voice echoed from every corner of the space. "You've been doing this for _how_ long, and you still think that will work?"

"Not really," Superman muttered to himself, as giant toy soldiers exploded out of a stack of crates on the far left wall.

He took them down easily—apparently Toyman hadn't been able to get his hands on anything worse that synthetic yellow K, which did little more than sting and scratch.

Superman swatted away the tiny yellow bullets and destroyed the robots. As he ripped into the largest one's mechanical heart, mechanical fluids and gaseous dust exploded in his face. He coughed, waved the cloud away, and dove at Toyman, who he could now see hidden two floors underground.

He tore the doll-man away from the laptop he was holding and flew straight up. At a thousand feet, the air got a cold nip to it.

"Where's the cash?" Superman growled, trying for a bare imitation of Batman (how did that man do it?). "And the nanites?"

Toyman swiveled his head 360 degrees, something that had always creeped Clark out. "Round and round and round it goes—where it stops, nobody knows!"

Superman shook him. "Where are they!"

Toyman's unblinking eyes fastened on him. "You want it? Here."

He pressed a button on his belt, something Clark had noticed too late. Across the city, a building exploded, fire raining down on innocent passerby and two men trapped on the top story.

Superman dove back to the warehouse, tied Toyman to the rail, and flew as fast as he could towards the building.

Clark came up to the Watchtower with soot and smoke clinging to his costume. He'd managed to rescue the two men, the nanite blueprints, and most of the building. When he'd come back to the warehouse, Toyman was gone, with the ropes cut. The three million in cash had yet to be recovered.

There was a headache building behind his eyes. Stress, probably—even Kryptonians weren't immune to that. He was going to take a shower and a nap, but the clock in his dorm room buzzed, and he realized it was time for the weekly Founder's meeting.

When he got there everyone else was already seated. Bruce gave him a look that clearly said _You're late_, but Clark didn't really want to deal with him right now.

Green Lantern started in with a long report on energy consumption. Clark found himself tuning out almost immediately. The dry equations slipped past his ears too fast for him to even want to grasp them.

"Kent," Batman hissed. Clark gave him the harshest glare he could muster, and rubbed his temples where the pain was.

But he gave in and tried to listen attentively, nodding in all the right places and finally Batman let up.

Despite his better judgment, Clark walked with Batman back to his dorm room. Bruce had the list of monitor shifts for the next four months, and he was going through them one by one. Clark was supposed to be approving them, but he couldn't care less.

He realized Batman had stopped talking. Instead Bruce was studying him intently, with the scrunched look that implied that the gears in his head were shifting at high speed.

"What!" Clark snapped, then he sighed. "I'm listening."

"No, you're not," Batman followed him into his dorm room. Clark sat on the bed and stripped off his boots. He caught a glance at the clock—that meeting had taken three hours. He hadn't slept in two days, no wonder he was run down.

Suddenly he felt a cool hand on his forehead.

"Fever," Bruce said, and put his right glove back on.

"I'm not sick," Clark protested even as he coughed and felt a dull pain below his ribcage. He startedto say _I don't get sick_ but had another fit of coughing. Bruce stood over him, not exactly smug, but more than a little goading.

"All right," Clark said, and took off his cape. The ache that had started in his head had migrated to his back and shoulders. He winced, and saw one of Bruce's eye slits open a fraction wider.

"Stop studying me," Clark glared at him, hoping that it looked like he meant it.

"You can think of it as concern if it gives you warm fuzzy feelings," Batman offered, deadpan.

"Your sarcasm is particularly potent today," Clark said, and leaned back against the pillows without even changing into normal clothes. Batman handed him a glass of water and aspirin. "Oh. You do care."

"Lois will really be on my case if you miss the next press meeting," Bruce watched him swallow the capsules.

"Jerk," Clark said, and half-closed his eyes. He heard Bruce take out a tricorder and scan him (it was pretty unusual, being sick) but he didn't much care.

"You can think of it as a joke, if that—"

"Shut up, Bruce," Clark winced, and waited for the pain meds to kick in. Bruce had given him four, hopefully enough to hit his system with some force. The tricorder beeped.

"One hundred and two," Batman said. "Haven't been flying near the sun, have you?"

Clark was about reply, but another, violent fit of coughing seized him, and this time he couldn't stop. Bruce started at the noise and jumped forward, but there wasn't much he could do.

It felt like his ribs were cracking.

When it was finally over, Clark was curled on his side with one arm around his chest. When he pulled the other hand away from his mouth, Bruce flinched.

There was blood splattered on his palm.

"I…"Clark began, and could come up with no way to explain it.

"What happened today?" Bruce asked, in his normally clinical manner. Clark cleaned the blood away with a tissue.

"I fought Toyman," he said. "That's it really. Hardly dangerous at all—he only had some synthetic yellow kryptonite."

"That doesn't affect you very much," Bruce muttered. "Did you breathe any of it in?"

"It exploded in my face. I couldn't help it."

Batman checked him over with his eyes. Apparently Clark passed the exam, because he straightened up. "The particles probably scratched up your throat and weaken you enough that you caught a bug. You should sleep."

"Take some of that advice yourself," Clark said, but Bruce had already walked out, so he slipped under the cover and dozed off.

Somewhere in the highlands of Tibet, a large telescope focused its gaze on the Watchtower. No one knew of this construction, it had been hidden so thoroughly from all the tax agencies of the world.

The construction of it had taken a painstaking four years, with the materials carted up in single truckloads and with only a skeleton crew of drifters working at a time, to avoid scrutiny.

Inside the facility, there was the observation deck and a single basement level more than a hundred feet underground. Inside this level were two supercomputers, whose contents were backed up on no external servers and that were protected by three levels of encryption; and a laboratory. Inside the laboratory stood a single figure, working under the light of a lone fluorescent bulb.

The man was putting the finishing touches on ten years of work: a capsule the size of a shoebox that contained a brilliant, nearly autonomous computer system and a payload of self-replicating machinery.

Sometime this week, the atmosphere would clear enough for him to launch, and then all of his plans, his great ambitions, his dreams, would come to fruition.


	2. Outbreak

~Chapter Two~

Late the next day, Bruce hadn't heard anything, which was worrying. If Clark had recovered from whatever it was he'd caught yesterday, then Batman would have seen him on the news saving innocents or some other boy scout-ish thing. If he hadn't, he probably would at least be asking for another aspirin (Bruce had taken them out his belt—it's not like Superman kept painkillers around).

So Bruce did the natural thing and decided to check on him.

He found Clark sitting on the bed with his head in his hands. There was a catch to his breathing, and Bruce wondered if Kryptonians could get pneumonia.

Superman looked up when he heard the footsteps. His eyes were bloodshot. "Bruce."

"Kent," Batman glanced at the trashcan and saw more blood-spattered tissues. "You've got monitor duty in a couple hours."

"I do?" Clark asked. It was a lie, just to test how sick he really was. Clark rubbed his eyes, looked at the door, and sighed.

When he stood up, he was unsteady on his feet. He started towards the door and suddenly his hand jerked towards the nightstand, for support. Bruce grabbed him by the shoulder and eased him back to the bed.

"I'm fine," Clark said.

"Bullshit," Bruce muttered. He took off one glove and tested Clark's temperature again. "You're really warm."

Another lie.

Clark was _burning_.

"Stay here," Batman cautioned, got a glass of water, and gave Clark what was practically an overdose of Tylenol.

"I'm cold, not hot," Clark pushed the pills away, weakly. Batman hadn't seen any indication of his powers, so maybe they were being affected, too. Not good.

"Then get under a blanket," Bruce snapped. "But you need to take these. They'll make you feel better."

"But you said I had cafeteria duty," Clark said. Bruce pushed the medicine into his hand again and this time he took them.

"I was-," Bruce paused. "I said you had _monitor_ duty."

He looked Clark in the eyes. "What day is it, Kent?"

Clark rubbed his eyes. Either the Tylenol was kicking in faster than expected or he was sicker than Bruce had thought. "Twenty-sixth, seventh?"

He turned his face up towards Batman. "Eighth?"

Bruce pushed the covers back on the bed and made Clark lie down. Then he pulled the blankets back over him. "I'll take your shift."

"Wouldn't want Lois killing you now, eh?" Clark said.

By the time Batman reached the door, the figure under the covers was already asleep.

The timing was perfect. The man packed his work into the capsule (so small—only the most powerful and paranoid of monitors would detect it, and then only at close range) and stuck the lithium batteries into their docks on the side.

Tonight was cloudless and still. Maybe there was someone looking down on his project, for him to be so lucky as to get a night like this one.

The man loaded his device into the small ion cannon that was poised at the tip of the telescope. It was almost midnight, and in just a few minutes he would launch.

He watched through the telescope's all-seeing eye as the self-targeting cannon locked on target. There was a soft chime, just enough to let him know it was done, and he pressed the red button at his side.

Bruce almost didn't go back, but he decided it would be kind to look in on Clark once more before he left for patrol. He knocked on the door but got no answer so he entered the access code and stepped in.

Clark was sprawled in the bed, his arm hanging off, with sweat running down his face. His eyes were half open but glazed over. There was vomit and blood on the sheets.

"Clark!" Batman leapt over, tore off the soiled sheets and threw them in a bundle at the foot of the bed. The he shook Clark by the shoulders, trying to get him to open his eyes. "Wake up, dammit!"

There was a twitch, and Clark blinked lazily, but his eyes didn't focus. Bruce shook him again and this time he looked up with something like comprehension.

"…hurts," he murmured, when Bruce made him sit up. There was blood on the corner of his mouth and the Tylenol hadn't made the fever go down.

"Where?" Bruce asked, but Clark just shook his head and nearly closed his eyes again. Batman yanked him to his feet. Clark stumbled and Bruce wrapped an arm around his shoulders, which seemed enough to keep him upright. "C'mon, we're going to the med bay."

Clark nodded, stepped forward, and passed out. Bruce caught him as he fell and eased him to the floor. Then he hit the red button on his communicator.

"Batman to med bay," He said, holding Clark gently, "medical emergency in dorm C67."

Then, he waited.


	3. Contagion

~Chapter Three~

It was killing him. Whatever Clark had picked up was ripping apart his cells from the inside out. It had started in his lungs and stomach, apparently, and that was where the blood was coming from.

It was sapping his powers, too. Three hours after the medics had strapped him onto the stretcher and carried him from the dorm room, he'd broken a rib coughing. Currently he was barely conscious, hovering in the haze of morphine and degraded pain.

The medic had tried everything from flu meds to overloading his system with a high-potency cocktail of antibiotics and programmed cells to seek out and destroy infection. It hadn't worked. The mysterious plague was still at work, carving up his body.

Batman himself had been checked over through a battery of tests and pronounced clean. Now he was standing on the deck overlooking the bay, separated from Clark by a pane of glass and the network of wires and tubes that crisscrossed over the other man's body.

Swiftly, he keyed the override code into the med bay doors and stepped inside. There was a good chance (78% probability, in fact) that the sickness wasn't contagious, that it had been tailored specifically to Clark's biology. He was willing to live with the other 22%.

The medics hadn't been able to do anything, but he was smarter than most of them and more obsessive.

From his belt, Bruce took a sterilized needle and slipped it into Clark's skin, another reminder of how he had been stripped of his powers. On the bed, Clark jerked and groaned at the added pain.

"Sorry, Kal," Bruce whispered, and drew two vials of blood. Enough to run a good amount of tests on. He would be able to find out what was happening, he was sure of it.

In Star City, someone was breaking into an apartment. Oliver Queen's apartment.

The archer woke up to a creaking in the living room. He noiselessly stood and padded to the doorway, reaching for his bow in the cabinet just around the corner.

He wasn't fast enough. A left hook like steel caught him along the jaw and he crashed into the floor, head spinning. Another sharp blow and he couldn't see straight.

Green Arrow lay on the floor of his apartment, panting and defeated, with his bow only a few inches away.

A dark figure loomed over him, and then everything went dark.

Batman slammed his fists on the table, nearly sending the microscope clattering to the floor.

He had found nothing. _Nothing_.

Sure, he'd managed to isolate the pathogen. For a second. Then it had mutated again and he was left searching for anything unusual again. When he thought he'd finally pinned it down the molecule had _broken apart_. Like it could _sense_ him.

Or maybe he was just trying to justify why he was grasping at straws.

He carefully squeezed another few drops onto a slide from the syringe. He'd hit Clark's blood with everything from immunosuppressant to huge amounts of solar energy. But now he was running out of blood to test on and he didn't want to have to draw more.

Batman pressed to buttons on his communicator, calling Diana. "How's Kent?"

She paused before answering. In the background, very faintly, he could hear the beeps and whirrs of hospital machinery.

"Not good," Diana said. Then, quieter: "They had to give him a blood transfusion. He was trashing and cut his knee—it wouldn't stop bleeding."

"Did they use Kara's blood?" he asked. "Or did they decide that his body could still transmogrify it, or that he was close enough to human?"

"Regular blood."

Batman heard something at the other end, like a scuffle and then furniture being knocked over. Diana said, "I have to go," and then turned off the comm without telling him what had happened.

Bruce sat down at the lab table again, accepted a cup of tea from Alfred (goodness knows how long _he _had been standing on the stairway) and put a new slide into the microscope.

The capsule found its way through space on autopilot. Twice it was nearly destroyed by a passing piece of space junk and once a small band of radiation came within seconds of frying the onboard computers.

But it weathered the storm unscathed and flew silently closer to the Watchtower. ETA: less than a minute.

Back on Earth, the man watched the grainy footage inside his bunker. He was grinning without even feeling it. Everything, _everything_, was working.

The capsule pulled into a tight orbit right below the Watchtower's main deck. It was too small to be detected by sonar, and it emitted as little radiation or vibrations as possible. Now that it had stopped needing jet propulsion, it was basically invisible.

Four silver arms emerged from the smooth silver skin of the capsule. Within seconds, they dug into the Watchtower's hull. Next a small drill appeared, opened a pinprick of a hole, and inserted a tiny wire.

Hundreds of miles below, the man's smile widened as information began pouring across his screens.


	4. Infected

~Chapter Four~

Ice was second on the list. Easy targets, at first—low risk and big payoffs.

The figure came for her in the night, dressed in a too large trench coat, boots, gloves. Maybe if she'd had time to rip off the hat she would have seen the face. But she didn't have time. Instead the figure put a sweet-smelling cloth over her mouth and carried her off.

Quite easy, really. She never even woke up.

At eight in the morning, Clark stopped breathing. The alarms sounded fast enough and loud enough for the medics to save him with the help of a respirator, but the conclusion was unavoidable.

"He's dying," Diana said. Clark was lying on a medical bed, behind a pane of sterilized glass. Wires and Tubes were tangled across his body. Both arms were held still in white plastic braces at the elbows, making easier for multiple IVs. Clear tubes ran into his nose and a breathing mask covered his face.

"No, he's not," Bruce was running on caffeine now, eyes bloodshot from hours of staring into a microscope.

"Bruce…"Diana put her hand over his. They were standing at the railing overlooking the medical bay. She had a look on her face he was all too familiar with—soft, sad, and pitying.

"Bruce," she repeated. "He hasn't been lucid in hours."

Batman yanked his hand away. "_I'm_ not giving up on him."

Diana's eyes flashed, but she held her temper. "Neither am I. But he's not getting out of this easily, Bruce. He isn't just going to miraculously get up, all well and new. And the medics—you as well—are no closer to even finding a diagnosis."

Bruce looked away. Diana softened and put her arms around him.

"I'm sorry," she whispered. "I'm worried, that's all. He isn't getting any better."

Bruce pulled away from Diana. "I have to get another blood sample. I think I'm close to separating the pathogen's behavior pattern."

Diana rubbed her temples, exhausted. "Hera. The medics can even track it in his bloodstream—like its been engineered to hide."

"_Engineered_," Bruce said, and grabbed her by the shoulders. "That's it!"

"What?" Diana asked, but Bruce turned and ran down to the med lab for a vial of Clark's blood to test his theory on. "Bruce! What did you find?"

On the outside of the Watchtower, the capsule exploded from the sides, silver ooze spreading out over the hull. The mass writhed and shivered, until finally the executive programs established control and the mass began to flood outward, spreading itself thinner and thinner until only a sheen of slightly lighter silver was visible.

Then the mass began to melt into the Watchtower, particles so tiny as to push between the atoms of the hull and infect the inner core.

The only part of the capsule to remain was the tiny wire that had hooked into the control systems. From here the scientist could see every move of his creation.

Bruce carefully set the petri dish of blood into a sliver box, slid down the tinted lenses on his mask, and his the dish with a targeted EMP. Seconds after it was done, he wrenched open the box and ran to the electron microscope, sliding the dish underneath the lens and flipping on the light in one fluid motion.

Inside Clark's blood were machines—nanites tiny enough to hide behind a white blood cell and varied enough to escape the easy defeat of a self-replicating, but identical, virus. The blood in the petri dish was now a brownish blue color. A poison failsafe, to ensure that if the nanites were somehow deactivated the patient would die too.

Bruce stiffened. As he watched, the machines came back online, changing their structures and moving through the blood again. One ripped open a group of dead blood cells, still following its programming to seek and destroy.

He called Diana, "Clark's infected with self-replicating machines. Some of the smallest I've ever seen."

She sounded tired when she replied, but he supposed he sounded the same. All of them, even Wally, were pulling double duty holding the League together. "Can you stop them?"

"I hit it with an EMP. That's supposed to stop anything electronic."

"But it didn't stop them."

"No," Bruce peered into the scope again, and saw the nanites destroy a section of arterial lining he'd put inside the dish. "Which isn't possible. Or wasn't. All it did was flood the sample with toxic acid."

"So who could make machines that resist EMPs?" Diana asked. "Luthor? Toyman?"

Bruce pulled up the files on the computer. "No. I've been watching Luthor pretty closely. No way he has this technology. And even if I thought Toyman was capable of it, he's been locked up in Tokyo's Metahuman Containment since last Christmas."

He rubbed his dry eyes. "Even I don't have a clue how they did it. So where does that leave us?"

It hit them both at the same time.

"Apokolips."

"I get on it," he said. Over the comlink, he heard someone start talking to Diana.

"All right," she said, "I'll help as soon as I can, but I have to do something first."

"What's going on up there?" he asked.

"Focus on Apokolips, Bruce. I've got it," she replied. He heard the person talking to her start to get louder, and then she signed off.

One his way out of the cave, he took one last look into the microscope. The nanites had reduced everything to the pink mush of decimated cells.

"Ice is missing," Guy Gardner came up to Diana as she was talking to Bruce and all but tore the comlink from her ear. "Her apartments been ransacked and I can't get a trail."

"Hang on," Diana, distracted, held up her hand. "Focus on Apokolips Bruce, I've got it."

"_Ice is missing_!" Gardner yelled, green lantern fire raging around his feet. Diana turned off the com.

"Tell me what happened," she said.

"I went over to her apartment. I…uh…left something there, " Gardner blushed suddenly. "Her dresser was turned over and the bed was all unmade. She's a neat freak, she wouldn't have done it. The ring couldn't even pick up a heat signature."

Something prickled in the back of Diana's mind. Black Canary had been asking about Green Arrow yesterday. He'd been gone for two days, she said. Apartment all unmade.

"Come with me," she told Gardner, and ran towards the monitor room.

Stargirl was alone in the house, both her stepfather and her mother out on separate errands. She was standing in front of the mirror, admiring her new costume with the metallic red star.

Someone walked up behind her and grabbed her around the throat. She tried to scream, but the figure choked off her air supply. She swung the cosmic rod at him, and hit him in the arm.

The figure's hand fell off. Stargirl tried to scream again. The figure tore the rod from her with its other hand. She tried to kick him but her foot connected with nothing.

Eventually, she passed out from lack of air.

The nanites from the capsule had no reached the inner core of the Watchtower, replicating and replicating until they filled the carpet, hid under the floorboards, and stuck to the costumes of every one of the dozens of Leaguers to walk through the halls.

The scientist tapped into the Watchtower's mainframe and began the process of invasion.


	5. Quarentine

~Chapter Five~

The truth of Apokoliptian technology, and one that the Justice League had done their best to cover up, was that it was not hard to come by. All of the Parademons, New Gods, and minions of Darkseid brought pieces with them in the numerous battles the JLA had fought.

It was impossible to contain all of it. A passerby could pick up a chunk of asphalt as a souvenir when really it was a damaged motherbox in disguise. The black market was overflowing with stolen energy weapons and matter resequencers.

It was easier than ever to be a supervillain these days.

Batman started going through his files, one by one. Most of the pieces he had tagged were secure in research facilities or government storehouse. Not that he trusted that, of course. It just made the odds slightly less likely.

He'd been at it for two hours when he started feeling a headache in the back of his skull. One of the symptoms Clark had had. Bruce took a syringe out of the drawer and drew a sample of blood. He stuck in the microscope and saw just the usual blood particles. Damn. Just tired, then.

He sat back down at the computer and took an aspirin to stay focused. Something was nagging him about one of the previous entries. He scrolled back up and saw it: a fractured mother box held in a Tibetan bunker.

The status said not _contained_ but _on location_. Government code for "we don't know where it is."

It appeared he would be making a trip to Tibet.

More calls were coming in, and Diana had Flash running around just to keep up. Pat called asking if anyone had seen Stargirl. Then Alan Scott, about both Jade and Obsidian. Beast Boy hadn't shown up at the last Teen Titans meeting, and Cyborg was off the grid.

Diana tried calling up their communicators. All were non-functioning. She was starting to get a very bad feeling about this.

Blue Beetle called her over to the monitor bay. "There's something wrong here."

"I know," she said. "we have to find them."

"No," he jabbed at a line of code on the screen. "Look. There's a ghost in here."

"What?" Diana said. "Like Deadman?"

If she was anyone else, Ted would have given her a snarky look. But instead he explained. "No, a program hidden inside the Watchtower's. A real good one, too. If I hadn't been searching for something out of place, we'd never even know it was there."

"So what's it doing?" Diana leaned over the computer and Ted had to resist a look up her costume.

"As far as I can tell, its hooked into our database," he hit a few more keys. "It's so well-protected…I can't tell what it's doing."

"Hang on," she told him, and pressed a button on her comlink. "Bruce?"

A pause. "No, it's _important_. Did you install a ghost program in the database?"

Another pause, then she turned back to Ted. "Shut it down."

He tried, running every counter-program he could think of and even trying to override the current OS. Then, he screen shut down.

And all the other screens. Next the lights, and the stoves in the cafeteria, until everyone was standing in utter, quiet darkness.

They'd found his program. Sooner than he'd wanted but this continuity was not unplanned for—indeed it only meant that his plans would have to be put into action a bit sooner.

He flipped the two blue switches on his control board—safeties, to override the nanites kill controls. He'd bootlegged the bugs' design. They were meant for repair and he'd melded them with his prize from the Asian alliance.

A perfectly harmonious hybrid of alien and human.

He pressed the red button to his right, and waited.

Batman glided the Batwing into a snow bank by the Tibetan storehouse. He turned on the camouflage, and the plane vanished.

The two guards outside the doors knew nothing. He made sure of that before he tranquilized them. The solider on break in the hall were likewise ignorant. He open the first door after evading the security lasers.

The hall was sterile steel and frosty cold, all leading down in to a single, foot-thick titanium door. Batman hacked the codes in under thirty seconds and slammed the door open.

Immediately, bullets sprayed in his direction. He leapt over the stream and took out the gunman. The other guard, a boy barely out of his teens, turned and started running into the warehouse.

Batman went after him. The warehouse was dug fifty feet underground, with shelves going all the way to the ceiling stack high with metal boxes. This was one of China's most secret storehouses. Not very impressive by way of security.

He threw a bolo, tying the young solider to a support beam. The man struggled, but gave up when he found it wasn't any use.

Batman loomed over him, a razor-sharp batarang in his hand. The solider started shaking.

"What happened to the motherbox?" Batman growled, in Mandarin.

The boy shook his head.

"You _know_ what I'm talking about," Batman grabbed the guard's collar, slammed his head into the pole. "Tell me! Now!"

He finally spoke this time, after swallowing twice. "Two men broke in…we don't know how. Months ago, and the sensors never found a breach. It…it was the only thing they took." He finished with a pleading look.

"And China couldn't let out that Apokoliptian technology was missing, not when there were so many international sanctions on it," Batman left him tied up and went to find the empty crate.

The crate was right where it should have been, with a few investigation devices left around it. It had been months, and nothing had been found, obviously, so they were finished with the investigation here.

Batman took out his penlight and released the pressure latch on the crate. It was clean and had not obvious rips or damage he could trace. There was pathetically little security on it. Obviously, the Chinese government thought it was safe here. Ha.

He shone the light on the shelf space around the box, and there found something. Fine brown sand—and yet they were on the slope of a snowy mountain. He took a sample but was already sure the analysis wouldn't show it originating from Tibet.

Bringing part of one's environment along was always the mark of an inexperienced teleporter.

Bruce arrived back at the Batcave at four a.m. All in all, it had been a somewhat productive five-hour jaunt. He could, at least, narrow down the suspects. Just the odd call from Diana on the way back, but he didn't have time to puzzle over that.

There was a message flashing on the computer, from the Watchtower. He absentmindedly clicked it while he loaded the sand sample into the analyzer.

"Bruce, we're under attack," it was Diana, swathed in the flashing red emergency lights. Klaxons sounded in the background. Batman turned around. "Someone's invaded the Watchtower. We can't get a lock on them or find the breach and the power's mostly—"

The screen went black.


	6. Pathogen

**A/N: Sorry for the extremely long wait, but I've been very busy lately. I promise I'm not giving up on this fic!**

~Chapter Six~

It took Batman twenty minutes to hack into the Watchtower's mainframe. The security feed had been utterly decimated. How, he wasn't sure, but from what he could tell there was no hope of reconstructing it. He'd have to go in blind.

The teleportation system was harder—blocked by security algorithms he'd never encountered before.

He broke through with the help of a Trojan horse he'd installed in the system years earlier in case of such a circumstance. He plugged in his coordinates and felt the slightest static tingle as the teleporter enveloped him.

The Watchtower was deathly silent and freezing cold. Bruce's light footsteps echoed and multiplied into far too much noise. He leapt onto the rafters, which was quieter, and searched the A and B decks.

He found no one.

The temperature had been turned down to thirty degree. He could see the steam of his breath condensing every time he breathed out. First order of business: get to the life support controls and turn the heat back on. Whatever had turned it off obviously wanted it that way for some reason.

He pulled open the elevator doors and scaled the empty shaft, until he reached the main monitor room—the heart of the Watchtower. It took some effort to pry these doors open; they were reinforced with a steel-titanium layering a security devices threaded in between. Lucky he'd made the blueprints.

Batman stepped out of the shaft dusty and grime-covered, and saw Stargirl standing motionless in the middle of the monitor room. She was staring up at the dead screens, arms limp at her sides, Cosmic Rod nowhere to be seen.

Before thinking: "Courtney?"

And then she turned and he saw the depths of his mistake: Stargirl's face was just as dead expressionless as the computer banks. She leapt on his from six feet away and they both fell backwards down the elevator shaft.

Bruce pulled himself out of the second floor elevator doors twenty minutes later, with Stargirl unconscious and tied up on the floor beneath. His shoulder ached where she'd bit—_bit,_ for chrissakes—him hard enough to go through the unprotected joint in the armor below his collarbone.

Whatever had taken her over had left no evidence he could check without a lab—no odd vernacular of mid control nor the stutter movements of robotic intervention. Just a silence, which was basically a symptom of any mind-takeover across the board.

Batman decided to go with the stairwell, this time.

He shot a grapple up the thirteen stories of stairs and flew up, landing silently in the observation bay. This deck was the smallest of all of them, and he made sure it was completely empty before accessing the backup life support systems.

They were completely locked down, layers upon layers of code he'd have to bypass just to change the temperature. And since they'd done it from inside the Watchtower, with security access, his Trojan horses were inactive against it.

He started on the codes and got nowhere in six minutes flat.

The temperature would have to stay, then. Maybe it would be a good thing. Not alert them to his presence, whoever _they_ were.

In his head, he went over the list of people who could infiltrate the Watchtower, incapacitate the entire Justice League, and keep their identities hidden. It wasn't a long list. Armies had tried, and failed.

It wasn't Darkseid's style—he was one to make a show. Lex wouldn't be successful. A new Doom Legion? Possible, if they played themselves just right, but that would mean putting away all the mental instability and questionable morality that made them supervillains. Not likely.

He was at a loss.

The obvious place to go next would be the big warehouse spaces on the eastern and western nodes. That was where the rest of the league would probably be contained, since defensively it was easily guarded and offered few strategic positions for an offensive force.

That was how he'd designed it anyway. He had never thought he would need a failsafe system for a room that was designed as a base in the event of a catastrophic invasion.

Maybe he could access Clark's files. Kal did have more experience with races out of the immediate galactic region than he—

Clark.

Bruce ran back to the stairwell and leapt down six flights. Middle floor—med bay and cafeteria. He dashed to the IC unit and wrenched open the door. The windows were all dark, of course—they were really computer screens that laid vital information over a camera view of the patient.

5A. Where they were keeping Clark. He broke the lock on the door and threw it open.

Clark was in bed, comatose as he'd been before. Bruce scanned him to make sure that it was really him and not a duplicate. There were tertiary generators protecting the med bay—he wouldn't be able to use them for retaking the Watchtower, but they were still keeping Clark alive.

Bruce relaxed, slightly. And that was when he saw the figure kneeling on the other side of the bed.

He flicked the night vision in his cowl up a notch and saw Diana bound, gagged and bloody. Her hair was askew and her tiara missing. She looked to be knocked out, held up only by the fact that she was tied to the guardrail on the hospital bed.

Bruce ran around the bed and cut through the gag. Diana looked up at him, not unconscious but half-lucid and falling out of it.

"You shouldn't have," she whispered, then passed out and fell into his arms.

A second figure appeared out of the floor in a dark trench coat and beaten-down hat. Bruce laid Diana on the floor and leapt at the figure, going for a disabling punch to the lower abdomen.

His hand went through the figure's stomach.

And then it was all over him, choking him, disorienting him, and breaking apart on every point he fought it at.


	7. Antidote

**A/N: Sorry for the irregularity in posting, but I'm trying to get my two fics caught up to with each other. The second is slightly behind.**

**Only 2 chapters left!**

~Chapter Seven~

Bruce fought, kicked, punched. He couldn't see a thing except for the swirling grey mass on every side. None of his blows were landing on anything solid.

He tried to strike out again, flew forward, and slammed into the table. At least he knew where he was now. He leapt to the left, towards the door, trying to keep the fight away from Clark and Diana.

The hiss of the door, motion-sensitive, made him turn to the right. He dove on impulse and felt carpeting under his hand. Out in the hall, then, finally. He reached blind into his belt, grabbed the first thing his hands closed around, and flung it into the mass.

Smoke filled his mouth. A grenade. He held his breath. A high, tortured screeching filled his ears, like nails on a chalkboard times a hundred. The noise built up until he felt like his head was going to explode. He yanked another cartridge from his belt, threw it into the ground. Everything went bright white.

When Bruce woke up, he was lying on his back in the hallway on a floor of silver-coated carpet. He sat up, head still pounding from the screech of whatever-it-was. He sat up and noticed the carpet. When he lifted up his hand it came away silver—like someone had spritzed his glove with spray paint.

He carefully sniffed the residue. Metal, lead, and oil. This wasn't paint.

This was the key.

Batman leapt to his feet and started searching for the remains of whatever he'd thrown at it second. That was the tipping point—the combination of smoke and mild pepper spray and the energy of the flash grenade (which kind had it been? Electroshock? Chemical?). Just the right mix to tear apart the slight electron bonds that allowed communication between pieces.

He found part of the casing. It was one of his more unique ones, that he used on Mr. Freeze—just enough antifreeze to heat the air and an electric pulse that could knock down a six-foot-eight boxer.

Bruce sprinted back to the med bay. In the utter darkness, he couldn't gauge how long he'd been out—it could be long enough for Clark and Diana to have been moved. But when he threw open the door Clark was still hooked up to the machines and Diana was passed out again next to the bed.

He cut the ropes off her and shook her, gently. "Di, come on, wake up."

There was blood crusted in her hair. A concussion, probably. Someone had hit her in the head damn hard. He resisted the urge to punch the closest thing and lifted her up. She stirred in his arms and opened her eyes. "Bruce…what's happening."

"I think I figured out how to beat this thing," he said. Her voice was a little slurred. She wasn't invulnerable. Strong, yes; immortal, yes. But there was a reason she used her bracelets to deflect bullets and not her chest.

"Good," she pulled out of his arm and stood on shaky feet.

"Where is everyone?" Bruce kept a hand by her side. She didn't look all that steady.

"I don't know," she put her head in her hands. "They shut down the security system first. Then these…things…came out of the walls. People just started going down," She raised her head, pulling herself together. "I woke up here, when you came in the first time."

"Let's get to the hangers," Bruce drove open the doors to the service elevator. "It's the best place to hide a large group of people."

He grabbed a hold of the elevator cable and started climbing up. He glanced back—Diana wasn't following.

"I can't fly," she whispered.

"What?" he asked.

"I can't. I'm trying, it's not working," she flexed the muscles in her legs, nothing happened to lift her off the ground. She looked panicked. Bruce leapt back down to the ground.

Diana froze when he touched her arm, and then backhanded him so hard he flew down the hallway, into a wall.

"What the hell, Di?" Bruce yelled, pain splitting through his shoulder. Diana stared at him, cold and silent. Then she flew at him, jumping up so quickly he barely had time to fling himself towards the stairwell. His cape whipped backward. Diana had missed him by two inches. "What are you doing?"

She turned millimeters from the wall, and stared at him. Something caught his eye—a smudge of silver by her ear. His mind flashed back to Stargirl and a detail he'd passed over earlier: silver on her boots.

Batman ran and leapt into the elevator shaft. He wrenched the doors open, grabbed a pen fuse from his belt and welded them shut. Diana slammed into the door, leaving a dent. She'd been weakened, for sure. His advantage.

He pulled a metal panel off the wall and welded that over the seam. It should reinforce it enough to give him time to get out. He repelled up the shaft. Just when he'd reached the top floor, she broke through his barrier. But by then he'd vanished.

That's what had happened then. The others were being played like pawns, hidden away somewhere until they needed to be deployed. Diana had been just another piece.

A lab. He needed a lab, to mix a batch of those chemicals and try to drive out the nanites that had infected the Watchtower. He was two levels above the nearest one and two rooms right. There was a ventilation shaft running down that should get him there uninterrupted.

He broke open the dormitory door and unscrewed the panel covering the shaft. Even though he'd made it as large as possible it was still a tight fit. He pulled himself over feet first and slipped down, feeling his way in utter darkness. His fingers brushed the access panel and he drove it open with his elbow.

The lab was warm, compared to the rest of the Watchtower. Bruce had placed so many safeguards on this room that he would have been surprised if they _had_ broken them. There was also a back up life support console. He'd need that, eventually.

First of all he'd have to get the chemicals together. Then use the temperature, and drive them all towards the northeast corner, the most cutoff from the rest of the Watchtower.

He knew that the machines, or their creator, would be trying to track him. He had, at best, an hour. And Clark—whatever had happened to him had to do with this. His time might be less.

Bruce started mixing the chemicals, as quickly as he could.


	8. Immunization

**A/N****: Sorry for the long delay, I was attempting NaNoWriMo and failed. Ah, well.**

~Chapter Eight~

Bruce started with the climate controls. It was necessary for more than one reason—even in his suit his hands were starting to shake from the cold. He really should have taken the one with heat sensors, but then, it had been and emergency.

He brought the heat up in the outer sectors first, slowly moving it closer and closer to the contained south wing. Watching on the security monitors, he saw the silver shimmer fall apart and pull its strength together, fighting towards the cold areas.

It slithered alone, some of it breaking down and coating the carpet. He'd have to deal with those later. For now he barricaded the door, as a precaution, and set up a buckets in the corner. His grenades weren't meant to be broken open, but he struck it against the titanium computer bank again and again until the casing cracked.

He carefully removed the smoke cartridge with a pair of tweezers and set it gently into the first pail. Two more grenades produced a good amount of the substance. From more grenades he emptied out the pepper spray.

There was a maintenance bot in the closet. Bruce picked it up, flipped it over to the beetle underbelly and pried open the chest plates. A little remote tracker was all he needed to install to allow him to control the robot with a remote.

He took the first bucket and with a pen laser carefully welded it onto the back of the metal insect. Then he placed a flash grenade inside and set the whole contraption inside the ventilation shaft.

There were cameras in the bug's eyes that let Batman see in grainy footage its path through the maze. He guided it to the south wing. By this time, the nanites were cowering in the last cold room: an isolated storage room.

The bot fell into the swirling grey mess. Bruce hit the switch—light flooded the silent screen and then darkness. He let the remote fall and strapped on a gas mask. He'd have to go down there and kill the rest of it.

He let himself out of the room and started down the hall, listening for footsteps. It was so eerily silent that he was sure he would be able to hear them immediately, but he didn't want Diana dropping on top of him either.

****#****

Bruce reached the storage room safely and flung open the door. It looked like a cave inside—walls coated slickly silver and stalactites hanging down from the ceiling. He tweaked on—it crumbled like dust.

There was a bulge in the corner, an oddly shaped, voluptuous bubble. Carefully, he pressed on the silver shell and cracked reveling Stargirl and Diana inside. He took the gas mask off his face and put it over each of theirs.

Silver poured down out of their eyes like tears.

Diana blinked and sat up. She stared at him for a minute, and shook her head to clear it. Bruce helped her to her feet.

"Hera," she said. "I threw you into a wall."

"I'm fine," he said, and swung the still-inert Stargirl over his shoulder as proof. "Come on, we need to get to the others."

"They're in the west storage bay," she said, and they went to the elevator, pausing just for Bruce to lie Stargirl down on a bed in the medbay. He stood up, and turned to Diana.

"I know how to help Clark," he said, quietly. "The nanites that infected the Watchtower are almost identical to the kind attacking him."

Diana jumped, ran to him. "Then get started!" she ran to the cabinet, got the beakers he'd need and an IV needle.

He grabbed her hand. "Diana, it's not like with you. They've infected all of him, down to the cell. I'd have to infuse his blood with it." He paused, bit his lip, and admitted, "I don't think he's strong enough to handle it."

Diana pressed the flat of the needle into his hand. "He'll die either way—at least there's a chance of saving him."

Bruce nodded and took the tools. She kissed him on the cheek quickly and ran to free the others. He mixed a little of the formula and turned to Clark, lying on the bed so small and weak.

His hand shook when he put in the needle. Clark moaned and turned his head away.

"Ssh," Bruce said o him, and didn't put in the compound until he'd fallen back into sleep. Just a little bit, maybe too little, but he couldn't risk flooding Kal's system with it. A tiny spark was all that was needed now, and then he'd have to wait while the chemical worked to see if he'd saved his best friend or killed him.

He watched the steady heartbeat on the monitors. Clark's breathing was ragged and choppy; he was struggling for each gulp of air. Bruce sat down in the chair next to the bed and held Clark's hand, keeping track of the pulse. He didn't trust the machines.

Clark shuddered, whimpering under the oxygen mask. The broken blood vessels in his eyes had caused a crusting of red along his eyelashes. He turned over again, coughing weakly, and it was a whole thirty seconds before he was able to draw another breath.

Bruce's comlink turned on. Diana was yelling, frantic. "Bruce! There's more! They came out of the wall, I—" She cut off in a burst of clanging metal. Bruce put his communicator next to Clark, to track his vital signs. He leapt up and ran.


	9. Cure

**A/N: Our final chapter!**

~Chapter Nine~

The entire Justice League was in the south warehouse, surrounded by a sea of silver, murderous nanites. Batman swooped in through the door, clearing a path with his grenade and mace combination. The machines were leeching from the walls.

That's how they'd survived—clinging to the pipes of coolant that ran through the Watchtower. Bruce snapped at himself mentally. He should have thought of that.

"Here!" Shayera yelled, holding up her mace and all its energy. He tossed her a supply of the compound in a plastic bag. She dove into the mass, planting the bag at its center and setting it off.

Diana grabbed two grenades from him and thrust them into the mass. It was constricting, writhing. It could only survive for a few minutes in this heat, but the sheer volume of it could take them all out unless they pushed it back.

Firestorm saw the compound and started transforming bits of the floor and walls into it while Shayera ignited it. GL sliced and diced the mass, easier to fight.

Someone screamed. Vixen—half her body sucked into the blob. GL tried to get to her but the nanites reached out and sucked him in too. And the silver shivered and shook and a third of the League disappeared into the sinking mass.

"Diana!" Bruce shouted, tossing all of his compound and leftover grenades to her. "Spread it out! Cover the whole thing!"

She rose into the air, chorusing the grenades and compound to dust, sprinkling it over the whole swarming body of nanites. It writhed, unconsciously mixing in the deadly stuff. Shayera swung her mace, crackling with electricity, and an almighty boom shook the room.

The swarm disintegrated, leaving half-conscious Leaguers lying on silver dust.

Bruce sat up, shook off the dust and reverberations from the explosion. His ears were ringing, and the smoke alarms must have been going off because there was something beeping shrilly. The other Leaguers began to pick themselves up. Diana groaned and got to her feet.

"What's that?" she asked, and pointed to his belt. He looked down, saw the communicator clipped to it. It was the one monitoring Clark's vital signs.

Every line had gone flat.

Bruce ran.

****#****

He was thinking of all the ways that the nanites could have torn Clark apart. Brain first, and painless, or agony from the limbs in. Eyes gone blind from decimated retinas, or choking on blood from wrecked lungs.

Diana had followed, reading the look on his face, but he never even looked at her, just threw the door open, heart pounding.

_Let it be a malfunction,_ he thought. _Set off by_ _the battle. Please._

The door to Clark's room opened at a touch. Bruce dashed in.

Clark was sitting up in bed, the sensors dangling off the bed. He was trying to yank out the IV. Bruce grabbed his hand and took it out quickly, pressing on the vein to stop the bleeding. Clark shivered in the hospital gown. He looked ten times better than he had, but still exhausted and worn.

Bruce resisted the urge to smack him. "Haven't you ever heard of leaving medical devices _on_?"

Clark looked at the wires like he'd just noticed them. "I woke up and I didn't know what they were. I'm sorry."

"It's all right." Bruce kicked the machines over to the other side of the room. He didn't much want to see them either. Diana had evidentially stopped by Clark room—she held out a sweater and jeans. He gratefully pulled them on.

"You ought to sleep," Bruce said.

Clark stood up. Bruce hovered next to him, just in case…

"I'm okay," Clark said. He did seem better, even in the few minutes they'd been there. "I've been sleeping for awhile, it feels like."

"Three days," Diana said. Clark looked startled at that, but recovered quick enough.

"Have you figured out who made these things?" he asked, after Bruce had shown him a slide of the nanites.

"Give me a few hours," Bruce said.

****#****

Amanda Waller was sitting at her desk, fingers steepled, and the blinds drawn. She was waiting. The clock ticked one minute, two.

She felt movement behind her. "I've been expecting you."

"You've crossed a line, Amanda." There was plain rage underneath the controlled voice.

"It wasn't us," she said, and watched Batman drop down in front of her desk.

"Who then?"

"That's classified."

He slammed his fist on the desk and she wondered, for an instant, exactly how very close Superman had come to dying. "Waller, I _can_ and _will_ rip you and your organization from seam to—"

"A rogue scientist," she said. "He got some records he shouldn't have, stole Apokolptian tech from some godforsaken Tibetan base. Delusions of grandeur, I'd say."

"I want a name."

She looked him straight in the eyes. So far all these power struggles had ended in standoffs. One day… "We took care of him."

He snarled, knowing full well what that meant.

"If it eases your conscience any," she said, "he wasn't human anymore. When we opened him up we found a swarm of the bugs. They'd taken over his brain and gotten some sort of consciousness. Probably a blend of his personality and it's, since it kept at the League."

He was barely swallowing his anger. "Do you have proof?"

She tapped the jar on her desk. Inside was an unmistakable slice of human brain floating dead and puffy in the formaldehyde. It shimmered with silver.

**THE END**


End file.
